Freenas

Seminar Abstract FreeNAS

What is NAS? NAS or Network Attached Storage is file-level computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous network clients. A NAS unit

is essentially a self-contained computer connected to a network, with the sole purpose of supplying file-based data storage services to other devices on the network. What is FreeNAS? FreeNAS is an open source NAS software designed for use on standard computer hardware. Its functions:1. 2. 3. 4.

Provide data storage Provide file systems Provide access to files Provide management of these functionalities

Features of FreeNAS:1. Is an open-source software and is easy to setup 2. Supports: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., 3. Supports software RAID (0,1,5) 4. Has a web-based configuration interface 5. FreeNAS takes less than 64 MB once installed on CompactFlash, hard drive or USB flash drive. 6. Has plug-ins for various tools like SlimServer, iTunes etc 7. Supports most of the existing hardware components. 8. Provide security and SNMP(Simple Network Management) features. Why FreeNAS? 1. RAID and Clustering is inbuilt thus data availability is usually high. 2. Performance can be increased by NAS because the file serving is done by the NAS and not done by a server responsible for also doing other processing. 3. FreeNAS can be run solely from disk drive itself 4. Many of the popular software and hardware components are supported, so no need for major up gradations. 5. NAS can enable simpler and lower cost systems such as load-balancing and fault-tolerant email and web server systems by providing storage services

Reference 1 http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/open-source-network-attached-storage-nas/

Open Source Network Attached Storage (NAS) 22 February 2008

Gary Sims wrote an excellent and in-depth review of FreeNAS (a FreeBSD-based network attached storage system). His article details his experiences with FreeNAS, how it worked, where it (or he) failed, and other tips and tricks that he found as he went. While FreeNAS appears to be the most popular (at least according to Google!) there are others out there, including OpenFiler (which is Linux-based). A NAS basically is a dedicated file server that provides many different protocols to the clients and acts as an appliance. In some ways, this is no different than the historical file server – but in these cases, the NAS device is much more a turnkey solution with no other purpose. Many NAS systems support Windows file sharing, Macintosh file sharing, NFS, and a plethora of other protocols – all in order to make files available as much as possible. OpenFiler is one of these. NAS devices were traditionally contrasted against SANs (storage area networks). The NAS provided a filesystem on the network; the SAN provides a block device on the network. This apparent sharp division of purposes does not exist in reality: some NAS systems also provide SAN resources as well. Which – FreeNAS or OpenFiler – would I use? Can’t say – OpenFiler caught my eye first, but FreeNAS has the FreeBSD base. I’m liable to try both of them one of these days.

Reference 2 http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/network-attached-storage-nas/

Network Attached Storage (NAS) 31 March 2009

Once you hear what a NAS appliance does, you might be tempted to think (as I did) what all the fuss might be about. But there are reasons for a NAS appliance, though a NAS isn’t for everybody. Network Attached Storage is nothing more than a server with a pile of disks and a dozen different ways to access them. For most intents and purposes, the difference between a File Server of yesteryear and the Network Attached Storage of today is conceptually rather minimal.

NAS typically provides access to files via such methods as Windows shares, NFS, iSCSI, Appleshare and others. So what does a NAS appliance provide that a NFS server does not? There are several benefits: •

Special purpose. Since the system is solely for the purpose of serving up files for users, there is no need for any other facilities except those that deal with its specified purpose. Thus, a lot of potentially vulnerable or unreliable code can be removed, and the speed and reliability of the system can be increased. Some systems do not come with a general purpose operating system of any kind, but rather a specially designed operating system for serving files alone.

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Extensive support. In many cases, since the system is specifically designed for serving up file storage, the innumerable variations of network storage protocols come supported out of the box.

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Ease of use. With the system designed to serve one purpose – and to provide the customer with the best possible experience – the system is generally made much easier to configure and easier to use than having to configure the varying servers and protocols independently.

There are two different NAS products that are the heavy-weights in the free and open source arena: FreeNAS (freenas.org) and OpenFiler (openfiler.com). The most obvious difference between these two is their base (and their associated licenses). The base for FreeNAS is FreeBSD, and like FreeBSD, is licensed using the BSD license. However, OpenFiler uses Linux as its base, and is likewise covered by the General Public License version 2. Reference 3 http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDNews&op=Story&ndns_id=3067

Posted On: Mon, Jun-29-2009 Written By: Tazz Title: Synology DS-409+ Network Attached Storage Device Review Storage device maker Synology introduced the DS-409+ a few months ago into a market filled with competitors. The NAS sector is booming right now as small businesses and even home users are realizing the benefits of a NAS: less power draw, persistent backup, media services, and compact units. The DS-409+, as the name alludes, is a business-class four-bay device ready to serve up a variety of protocols, services, and other devices to a network. ThinkComputers checks it out in this review. @ ThinkComputers

This article comes from JonnyGURU http://www.jonnyGURU.com The URL for this News is: http://www.jonnyGURU.com/modules.php?name=NDNews&op=Story&ndns_id=306 7

Reference 4 http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/150599

Configuring storage in FreeNAS By Gary Sims on October 24, 2008 (7:00:00 PM)

The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network. This article is excerpted from the newly published book Learning FreeNAS from Packt Publishing. Adding storage to the FreeNAS server is done in four steps: 1. The FreeNAS server is "told" about a physical hard disk. 2. This disk is formatted. 3. The resulting storage space is mounted and made available internally. 4. The mounted storage space is made available on the network via services like CIFS and NFS. Step one, telling the FreeNAS server about the disks at its disposal, is handled in Disks: Management. On opening this page, you will see a list of disks that are already configured. To add a disk, click the add circle and you will be taken to the Disks: Management: Disk: Add page. Use the Disk field to select which disk you want to add to the FreeNAS configuration. If you are using a hardware RAID controller, for the disks attached it, don't use the standard device names for each disk. Instead, these RAID controllers present a virtual disk for each RAID set, using a device named after the RAID controller driver. For example, the amr driver (which supports controllers by MegaRAID and some Dell and Intel cards) presents its virtual disks as /dev/amrd*. Also, some RAID cards present their hard drives as /dev/da*devices. Once you have selected the right disk from the drop down box, you can normally just go ahead and click Add. However, there are some parameters that you can tweak, and the field Preformatted FS needs to be set correctly if the disk is already formatted and has data on it. Apart from the native UFS format of the FreeBSD, FreeNAS supports FAT32, NTFS, and ext2. Once you have selected the disk from the drop-down menu and set any of the optional parameters, you can click the Add button, then apply the changes. The Disks: Management page should now show your disk(s) in a table, including information about the disk name, size, and filesystem. Formatting a newly added disk Once a disk has been added to the FreeNAS server, it needs to be formatted. Go to the Disks: Format page and select which disk you wish to format. Choose the filesystem you want to use. The default will be UFS; unless you specifically need FAT32 or ext2, it is best to format the disk with UFS. UFS is the NATIVE file format for FreeBSD, the underlying OS of FreeNAS. Attempting to use other file formats can result in unpredictable results, file corruption, and loss of data. You can also enter an optional volume label for the disk, but it isn't very useful, as it isn't used in the FreeNAS Web interface. Leave the minimum free space percentage at its default 8%, as lowering the threshold can adversely affect performance and auto-defragmentation. A final option allows you to tweak the way the disk is formatted, specifically to not replace the master boot record (MBR) with a new one during the format process. Normally, this shouldn't be needed, but some hardware RAID cards store information in the MBR. If you find that the drive doesn't format correctly and you are using a hardware RAID card, you can try formatting the disk with the option enabled.

Once you click Format Disk, you will asked if you are sure that you wish to format the disk. Click OK to proceed, then look for the Done! comment and the long list of superblock numbers before it. If you see that, everything is OK. If the formatting failed for some reason you will see an error message. For example, if spaces aren't permitted in the volume label, trying to format a disk like this will result in the last lines of the output reading: newfs: bad volume label. Valid characters are alphanumerics. Done! Once you have formatted the disk, you need to mount it internally in the FreeNAS server. Go to Disks: Mount Point and click the add circle. There are several important fields to fill in here: Type, Disk, Partition, File System, and Name. •

Type: Here, you can select if you want to mount a disk or an ISO file. For new physical disks, you need to select disk. The ISO option is useful if you have an .isofile and you wish to make its contents available on your network.

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Disk: Select the disk which you wish to mount. This will be the same disk as you used in Disks: Management and Disks: Format.

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Partition: Under FreeNAS, if you install the server software on a hard disk, then two partitions are created, the first for the operating system software and the second for data. When mounting disks, you need to know which partitions you wish to mount. By default, FreeNAS doesn't use the legacy method to partition disks, which involved storing the partition data in the MBR; instead it used the GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel as a replacement for the soon-to-be-obsolescent PC BIOS. If you have just formatted this disk using FreeNAS, select EFI GPT here. If your disk has previous data on it, select which partition the data is on. If you have installed FreeNAS on a disk and you want to use the rest of the disk for data, select 2.

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File System: For disks that have been formatted using FreeNAS, select UFS. If you have chosen to use another filesystem format or the disk already had data on it, select the appropriate file system type (FAT, NTFS, or ext2).

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Name: Each mounted disk needs a name to distinguish it from other disks. It does seem possible to use spaces in the name but for safety I recommend using a simple single-word mount point name. The name specified will be used to mount the disk under the /mnt directory on the FreeNAS server, so if, for example, we used store2, then the disk will be mounted on /mnt/store2 and that would be the name used to share the disk on the network using CIFS.

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Description: You can fill in an optional description for this mount point.

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Read only: Tick this to mount the file system as read-only, and even the Administrator account (superuser/root) may not write it.

Once you have filled in all the data, click the Add button. You will be shown a table with a list of the mounted drives on the FreeNAS server. Their status will be listed as Configuring. Click

Apply changes. Once the changes have been applied, the newly displayed table should include the new mount point with the status of OK.

Reference 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

FreeNAS is a free network-attached storage server, supporting: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5), with a web-based configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 64 MB once installed on CompactFlash, hard drive or USB flash drive.[1] FreeNAS is currently distributed as an ISO image and in source form. It is possible to run FreeNAS from a Live CD, with the configuration files stored on an MS-DOS-formatted floppy disk. There is also a VMware disk image available. The minimal FreeBSD 6.4 distribution, web interface, PHP scripts, and documentation are based on m0n0wall. FreeNAS is released under the BSD license.

Features •

Protocols: CIFS (via Samba), TFTP, FTP, NFS, SSH, rsync, AFP and UPnP.

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Extensions (plug-ins) for: SlimServer, XBMSP via and iTunes.

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rsync server, client and local sync.

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Unison support.

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iSCSI targets feature to create virtual disks.

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iSCSI initiator.

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Dynamic DNS client for: DynDNS, ZoneEdit, No-Ip, and freedns.afraid.org.

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File systems: UFS and ext2/ext3 are fully supported, NTFS read-only supported, and FAT32 read/write supported.

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Hard drive: P-ATA/S-ATA, SCSI, iSCSI, USB and Firewire.

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GPT/EFI partitioning for hard drives larger than 2 Terabytes.

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Networks cards: All wired and wireless cards supported by FreeBSD 6.

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Boot from HDD, USB key, CompactFlash, CD-ROM + floppy disk, or USB flash.

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Hardware RAID cards: All those supported by FreeBSD 6.2.

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Software RAID levels: 0, 1, 5, JBOD, 5+0, 5+1, 0+1, 1+0, etc. (using GEOM).

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Disk encryption with geli.

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Management of groups and users (Local User authentication or Microsoft Domains).

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S.M.A.R.T. support.

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Remote syslogd forwarding.

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SNMP monitoring (Netgraph and MibII).

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Email log and reporting notification.

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ATA over Ethernet (AoE)

Awards •

VMware - "Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge, Consumer"[2]

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sourceforge.net - Project of the Month January 2007[3]

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InfoWorld - Best of open source in storage[4]